The official web home and blog of Stupefying Stories magazine and Rampant Loon Press publications.

(Depending on your browser, you might need to right-click on this link and select "Open in a New Tab")

JUST RELEASED!

Click for special prices!

SUPPORT STUPEFYING STORIES! BUY OUR BOOKS!

TELEPORT TO THE MOTHERSHIP

LATE-BREAKING NEWS

• As part of a somewhat expensive Amazon ad campaign, we've dropped the price on The Fugitive Heir to $0.99. If this leads to better follow-on sales of The Fugitive Pair and The Fugitive Snare, we'll leave it at this price. C'mon, buy the complete set!

• All current issues of Stupefying Stories are now available free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers. See the right column for links. For non-US customers, these should automatically redirect to your local manifestation of Amazon. If they don't, let me know.

• Yes, we are in fact reading new submissions. Our revised submission guidelines aren't ready for public consumption yet, so you'll just have to send your story to submissions@rampantloonmedia.com and take your chances. One story at a time, please! No multiple submissions and no simultaneous submissions!

SHOWCASE IS MOVING BACK IN WITH ITS PARENTS!

As you may have guessed from the new banner, we're consolidating the Stupefying Stories blog and SHOWCASE webzine into one new site. In the meantime, before it's gone for good, you really should check out all the great stories on the old SHOWCASE site.

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

From the SHOWCASE archives...

No column this morning. I tried to write one but it proved too difficult, as this morning we’re at the oncology clinic, getting the results from my wife’s latest diagnostic imaging workup. I wanted to write about how crucial she’s been to the development of STUPEFYING STORIES, right from the very start, but everything I wrote kept coming out wrong.

Ergo, here instead is today’s installment in our ongoing “Best of SHOWCASE” series. My wife wants it known that she is the one who originally pulled this one of the slush pile and said we had to buy it, she is the one who decided we should run it today, and she thinks it’s absolutely hilarious.

“Never give up. Never surrender.” How can you not love a woman who answers a question about continuing treatment by quoting Galaxy Quest?

¤

Fiction: “Lucky,” by Russell C. Connor

Illustration by Keith Rosson

You don’t exactly feel like you’ve won the lottery when you get cancer.
But that’s how my doctor made it sound, when he called me into his
office to discuss the test results for the lump on my right arm, just
inside the bend of the elbow. I swear, the
old fart—just some quack I found online by searching near my house—had a
tinge of actual excitement in his voice as he read off the diagnosis.
It was all gibberish to me, words like synovial sarcoma and monophasic epithelial, but then he got to a phrase simple enough for me to latch onto.

“What was that?” I interrupted the stream of medical chatter.

He looked up from the paper and pushed his glasses off the tip of his
nose. “I said, ‘this form of growth is rare, occurring in an average of
one person per million.’”

“One in a million,” I repeated slowly. A cliché. Something you
whispered to your sweetie when you gave her that ring with the obscene
diamond. But even though I’d heard and said those words countless times
in my life, they suddenly seemed like an entirely new concept. “So
you’re telling me there are only about seven thousand people in the
entire world who have this kind of cancer?”

The doc smiled at me—smiled, if you can believe it, and
Jesus did I want to slap that expression right back off his face—and
said, “Actually, it’s probably less than that. There are two possible
types of cell growth associated with synovial sarcoma, and it looks like
you have them both.”

SUPPORT STUPEFYING STORIES! BUY AN ISSUE! BETTER YET, BUY TWO!

Stupefying Stories is a production of Rampant Loon Media LLC. The articles and images posted on this site are the copyrighted properties of their respective creators. The opinions expressed in posted articles and associated comments are those of the authors and readers and do not reflect the views of Rampant Loon Media LLC.